Monday, July 15, 2013

Graffiti as Essay -- Alison Stine on Street Art

Safari, Mama,
Hot Boy, Serv—these are the names of a handful of graffiti artists in my small,
Southern Ohio community. My favorite street artist calls them all painters, though until recently, I would
have called them writers.After all, that is mostly what they do:
write, again and again, their names on brick walls; down alleyways; in stickers
plastered over utility poles, slapped on the back of No Parking signs.

But that is not
all they do.Some create collages using
carefully arranged stencils.Others
paint free-hand: a world of color, shapes, and mystery.

I know some
people don’t think of street art as art at all, but trash: destruction of
property, evidence of gangs.But
where I live, in the foothills of Appalachia, a place of shuttered brick
factories and an old insane asylum, a place of trailer doors kicked in for drug
raids, of weeds and of rust—graffiti does not consist of gang signs so much as life signs, evidence of a searching
consciousness, of a struggle. And where I live, graffiti is not plastered on
active subway cars or cared-for houses so much as abandoned buildings, desolate
alleys, places of neglect and waste and sorrow—places that are already scarred.

One artist did a
large painting on a highway bridge, targeting that spot specifically to cover
up obscenities scrawled there by a rapist.One painted “Serve + Protect?” on the sheriff’s department,
the police station, and the courthouse walls (before he was caught). Someone
has been painting “Happy” in red bubble letters, shaped like balloons tied
together with string: Happy at the back of the slum apartments, Happy in the
alley paved with glass, Happy on the vomit-covered dumpster.

How is this an
essay?

How is it not?Who’s writing all these messages?Why are they writing them?How? Who is it for?If the purpose of writing is to communicate, entertain, intrigue, sing, or
challenge, graffiti is a mystery—the only mystery I know—that is alive, that is ongoing, another poem around
this corner; another chapter down this street, appearing overnight.

If the
definition of essay is “to try,” what
is trying harder than the making of covert, illegal art, a making often
conducted in darkness, under extreme time constraints, physical pressure, and
the threat of great personal peril?Street artists have been chased by drunks and junkies, tackled, heckled,
threatened, and of course, arrested.Painters jump fences, squeeze under wires, scale walls, dodge trains,
lean over rooflines, dangle their bodies over streets—all for the chance to say
something that may or may not be allowed to live.

What is a purer attempt
than to make art many people hate, most people don’t even see, and which will likely
be erased or defaced in a manner of days?

The first
graffiti was made by a Neanderthal in El Castillo, Spain.He pressed his hand on a cave wall,
then blew red pigment around his hand’s shape—a street artist taught me
that.

It’s pure essay.It’s pure attempt.

A new essay now:
Safari, who has scaled the highest buildings in town to write that name, large
and white, has someone painting alongside of him or her: Peach.I think Safari is a man.And I think Peach is a woman, and here
they are, essaying together, on the top of a brick building: PEACH on one side,
SAFARI on the other, covering almost the entire back, paint dripping down like
fifteen-foot fangs.

They would have had to scale the building; lean over the roof (a six-story drop), bricks pressing into their stomachs; and write upside down, using rollers with extensions—all to say only one word each: their names.

I’ve been a
writer for most of my life.But
never before have I felt the impulse to create as much as when I stood in an alley,
gazing up at those names.

I wanted to say
something then; to reach out to a stranger; to make him feel alive, as I did;
to make him turn around.To be
heard, to be seen, to be recognized—that’s what graffiti is essaying: I was
here, I lived, I tried, I tried, I am trying—no matter what you think of me—still.

Alison Stine is the author of two books of poems: WAIT (University of Wisconsin Press, 2011),
and OHIO VIOLENCE (University of North Texas Press, 2009).Her essays have appeared or are
forthcoming in Better, Diagram, and Southern
Humanities Review, and her nonfiction
books have been finalists in the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Book Prize. She makes her home in Appalachia.

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